Eight Feet Deep

 Beau­mont police shoot a guy out­side Sears at Park­dale Mall last night. That’s kind of impor­tant to me. I shop there. Some­times I have to do work at some of the stores there. It’s about two miles up the road from where I live. I’ve been going there since I was a long-haired kid, back to when the this won­der­ful, cov­ered shop­ping mall first opened in 1973. I would kind of like to know what hap­pened with the shooting.

 Here is what we know accord­ing to the three local TV sta­tions and one daily news­pa­per here in Beau­mont,  Texas. A 60-ish His­panic man was allegedly act­ing errat­i­cally inside a store at Park­dale Mall. He was sup­pos­edly bang­ing a shop­ping cart repeat­edly against a wall or door. (win­dows?) some­thing inside the store. Police arrived at the scene around 9 p.m. last night and found a crowd had formed and the man had — in cop-speak as relayed by the young reporter – “dis­played” a knife. Twice after the man “dis­played” the knife at police officers, the cops shot him and the sub­ject of the inci­dent was soon pro­nounced dead at Chris­tus St. Eliz­a­beth Hos­pi­tal. The offi­cer who shot the man, still yet to be iden­ti­fied by police, is on admin­is­tra­tive leave.

 Now all of the above tells me a lit­tle, but the indi­vid­ual reports from the Web and watch­ing the news last night left me won­der­ing and want­ing more infor­ma­tion. I’ve worked a num­ber of homi­cides dur­ing my years as a reporter and the first omis­sion I see in these news reports were a lack of wit­ness quotes or sound bites. I real­ize the inci­dent hap­pened just slightly before the 10 o’clock broad­cast and most likely around the newspaper’s night­side dead­line. But one sta­tion, Fox-affiliate KBTV4  has a 9 p.m. broad­cast and its stu­dios are in oppo­site sides of the mall from the Sears store. Their reports were less than illuminating.

 I try to give my local media the ben­e­fit of the doubt most of the times. I know what a dif­fi­cult and mostly thank­less and piti­fully pay­ing job theirs’ is. But I would guess most every reporter who cov­ered this story, at some time, shops at the mall. They go there when they want to get “man on the street” inter­views. And also some­thing that is impor­tant to me and should be impor­tant to the local media is that a cop shot and killed some­one with a knife. Was it, as cops some­time say, “a right­eous” shooting?

 Also, one remark by a reporter last night appeared to give the police much more than the ben­e­fit of a doubt when she said that after being around police it is known that if they or oth­ers are threat­ened “they respond as they see fit.” I really take issue with that state­ment. First of all, it absolves the police of any wrong­do­ing even before the shoot­ing review begins and prob­a­bly before the body of the dead man is cold. It leaves the impres­sion that police are always jus­ti­fied to shoot and kill in every situation.

 So-called “police-involved shoot­ings” (more cop speak), are never clear cut. They are even less so when a knife is involved. I have wit­nessed a stand­off between police and a knife-wielding indi­vid­ual. I also have viewed a video in court in which a man with a machete was hold­ing police at bay in his home. In both instances, the men involved were arrested with­out any injury. This was in a dif­fer­ent city and in one where I worked as a reporter.

 For­get the old saw con­cern­ing jour­nal­ists col­lect­ing the “who, what, where, when, why, how.” Some of these are more impor­tant than oth­ers and some of the oth­ers can be col­lected when wrap­ping up. And for­get that time is slip, slip­ping away, at least until it starts feel­ing like a bad gas pain. The 10 p.m. broadcast is upon us. The dead­line might run past 10 but not much more or  it could start cut­ting into the newspaper’s profit. Yeah guys, I know you have dead­lines. But you could have had sound bites or quotes from peo­ple who might have seen some­thing rather than strictly bas­ing your story on the local police spokesman. Even if they string yel­low crime scene tape from the Sears store all the way to High­way 69.  It’s amaz­ing what you can do when you are under dead­line. That’s why press asso­ci­a­tions and other orga­ni­za­tions award jour­nal­ist for best dead­line reporting.

 Now for the follow-ups. The edi­tors will want follow-ups until they make the pub­lic sick watch­ing or read­ing them. So how about hav­ing some real infor­ma­tion in them? Why did the offi­cer shoot the man out­side Sears? Was he jus­ti­fied? Did the offi­cer have non-lethal alter­na­tives even though he was jus­ti­fied? What kind of knife did he wield? The mall has unarmed secu­rity. Did they respond? Could they do any­thing other than call for police help? Why was the indi­vid­ual who was shot allegedly act­ing erratic? Does his fam­ily or friends know why? What was the man like in every­day life?

 These are some of the ques­tions that I would like to see answered. The local media in Beau­mont did a very poor job, at least in my eyes, of cov­er­ing the shoot­ing of this man at one of the city’s most promi­nent places and dur­ing the time of the year in which it is the most thick with peo­ple. I real­ize there are many dif­fer­ent fac­tors why they may have fallen short in their cov­er­age. Still, this one could have been a whole lot better.

 Hope­fully, the follow-ups will be much improved because a lot of folks want to know what hap­pened. I want to know.

 Would you con­sider your job the best around?

 Even though I very much like what I am doing, my job, or jobs actu­ally, are nowhere near one of those con­sid­ered the best in the coun­try, accord­ing to CNNMoney.com. The online busi­ness mag­a­zine has listed what it con­sid­ers the 100 best jobs in the coun­try based upon salary, qual­ity of life and job growth.

 I did a quick inven­tory of all the full-time and part-time jobs I have had since leav­ing high school 35 years ago. Com­pared with many who are per­haps 10 years or so older than I am, I imag­ine I look like a prize-winning job hopper.

 Peo­ple used to have jobs and stay with them until they retire. These days, not so much. One major rea­son for job hop­ping today is because the com­pany wants you to go so that they may restruc­ture or self-destruct or what­ever. Still, I have had six full-time jobs if you count the Navy, and my four news­pa­per jobs along with my cur­rent (strug­gling) career as a free­lance writer as one job. I have also had four part-time jobs includ­ing my present one work­ing for the government.

 Not one of the jobs I have or in which I have ever been employed are listed on that top 100 list. Here is a quick run-down of what I’ve done:

    Assem­bled boxes in a chicken pro­cess­ing plant. Whee!/Navy administrative/clerical worker/Professional fire­fighter (worked part-time for awhile mov­ing mobile homes. Eeeeeh. and also had a part-time EMT job)/Regional EMS planner/Apartment main­te­nance worker/Vacuumer at car wash/part-time edi­tor of monthly music magazine/Worked three part-time jobs — short-order cook, bar­tender and secret shop­per (Dairy Queen detec­tive)/Mental health worker/Journalist (edi­tor, reporter, free­lance writer)/part-time gov­ern­ment job.

 It really looks worse than it is. Actu­ally, when con­sid­er­ing per­cent­ages, 82% of 35 years work­ing have been with three jobs, pro­vid­ing you count the dif­fer­ent stops I had as a jour­nal­ist as one, and I do. But none of my jobs, as I said, were on the top 100 CNN­Money list. Well, it doesn’t mat­ter. None of the jobs I held were what you call “money mak­ers.” But I have spent 57% of my adult work­ing life as a jour­nal­ist, which is what I wanted to “be when I grew up.” Oh well, I got what I wanted to be while not nec­es­sar­ily grow­ing up. So be it. And the two worst jobs: mov­ing mobile homes and assem­bling boxes in a chicken plant. It takes a spe­cial breed for those jobs and I sup­pose I am a breed apart.

 I have said in numer­ous job inter­views, and it is only par­tially blow­ing smoke up the interviewer’s ass, that while some might look neg­a­tively on my hav­ing worked so many jobs I feel that every expe­ri­ence I ever had helped me do the next job better.

 Speak­ing of longevity, I read in Elise Hu’s blog on Texas Tri­bune that long-long-time Asso­ci­ated Press pho­tog­ra­pher Harry Cabluck was one of those unfor­tu­nate few who were laid off yes­ter­day dur­ing that wire service’s per­son­nel purge.

 Hu notes that Harry, 71, was in the motor­cade when JFK was shot in Dal­las. He has been based in Austin for many years. A ton of trib­utes are being col­lected in Hu’s blog for Harry.

 I don’t know Harry well. I only was in his space twice. Once we talked for a few min­utes on the floor of the Texas House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives while wait­ing on some­thing or the other. The other time was quite a bit longer.

 Harry and I were among press cov­er­ing some­thing at Fort Hood. He had left his car at the south­ern end of the post and we were up at the north­ern extreme. I gave him a lift and was enter­tained by Harry along the way. What I remem­ber the most was his talk­ing about some cohort or acquain­tance of his — that and it was about a 20-minute drive and I really needed to use the bath­room. Harry said either the cohort or both of them used to spend time mak­ing up sto­ries about peo­ple they would see — total strangers – while they were dri­ving along. Harry gave some really funny exam­ples while we were dri­ving and, well, you had to have been there. I’m sure Harry doesn’t remem­ber that although I under­stand he has a pretty good mem­ory. I, how­ever, do not.

 Best of luck to Harry Cabluck in his future.

 It isn’t often that I am encour­aged by a defama­tion law­suit. You see, I am pretty big into free speech, if you haven’t noticed. I also was once sued for defama­tion. It wasn’t pretty and the alle­ga­tion wasn’t true. A fed­eral judge booted the case out on its res ges­tae where it belonged.

 But the legal action I am talk­ing about is one that could help erase the scourge that cheap­ens mod­ern mass com­mu­ni­ca­tion and raises the nation’s stu­pid­ity quo­tient. That would be hate­ful and libel­lous open com­ments on arti­cles pub­lished on the Inter­net that are writ­ten by anony­mous correspondents.

 The case involves a Ken­tucky attor­ney who is suing Kentucky.com, owned by the Lexington-Herald Leader. A per­son using a screen name allegedly made defam­a­tory com­ments against this attor­ney. The lawyer is defend­ing a man charged with mur­der and vio­lat­ing a domes­tic vio­lence order. The attor­ney says she just wants the real name of the per­son who made the com­ments so that she may take fur­ther legal action. She is, how­ever, seek­ing unspec­i­fied dam­ages plus those for pain and suffering.

 The edi­tor of the paper said the per­son mak­ing the com­ments was banned from the site and that the com­ments were removed. The paper is con­tact­ing that per­son to see if they want to invoke their rights to anony­mous free speech.

 Lest you think I may show some hypocrisy here sup­port­ing other forms of free speech but not anony­mous free speech, rest assured that I am not. But there are defama­tion laws and libel laws. That I know for sure and even though I may not like those laws when they are mis­used against me to dig into deeper pock­ets, I feel those statutes are there for long-held prin­ci­ples against bear­ing false wit­ness against one’s neighbor.

 My agree­ment with this suit is for much less loftier rea­sons though. I sim­ply am sick and tired of see­ing a bunch of racist, igno­rant, idiots dom­i­nate these com­ment boxes, say­ing what they want about whomever or what­ever most often with­out facts to back them up.

 What is even worse are news­pa­pers and other media plat­forms that use sites clum­sily dis­guised as not a part of that media out­let which are used to start or build upon con­tro­ver­sies employ­ing sub­tle, but incitable mate­r­ial. See: race baiting.

 News­pa­pers, especially, should reflect the soci­ety that sur­rounds it. But papers should also mir­ror the respect­ful­ness and good man­ners that are at the core of a civ­i­lized society.

 I don’t wish for any finan­cial ruin for any­one in the afore­men­tioned law­suit. I also hope it don’t lead to judi­cial prece­dent that would threaten free anony­mous speech. Some­times, that is the only way some peo­ple can com­ment with­out fac­ing some kind of phys­i­cal or eco­nomic dan­ger. But I do wish such an action could remind those with some sort of a media mouth­piece — be it The New York Times or eight feet deep — that anony­mous speech need be respon­si­ble speech.

A media out­let — be it news­pa­per, radio, TV or Inter­net — may some­times find it pays off to get scooped.

It was some­thing I found dis­taste­ful when ink ran through my arter­ies, to have another news pur­veyor break a good story. It was also some­thing I tried, at least on what­ever beat I was work­ing, not to let happen. But when you have a story that is a rel­a­tive deep, dark ques­tion pit one may have to let the com­pe­ti­tion jones go for a bit until some mys­ter­ies can be solved. A story that is sure to raise some hack­les in my neck of the woods is a fine example.

A  man in described by police as “men­tally chal­lenged” in Kir­byville, Texas, died of an appar­ent heart attack while wait­ing some 30 min­utes for an ambu­lance to arrive, accord­ing to local news out­lets. Kir­byville is about 40 miles north of where I live. The ambu­lance that finally arrived came from Sils­bee, about 30 miles away, and belonged to a com­pany that does not even reg­u­larly oper­ate in that area.

Now some­one wait­ing on an ambu­lance for 20–30 min­utes is a long time in a city or most sub­ur­ban areas. How­ever, I am sure there are rural areas in cer­tain parts of the coun­try, even in par­tic­u­lar por­tions of Texas which have to wait even longer. So even though the long “wait” is being focused upon by the local media — and I am not being crit­i­cal here, rather I am think­ing out loud — there are a lot of ques­tions which need answer­ing to make this a much more mean­ing­ful story:

1. The story states the Kir­byville chief of police and another per­son per­formed CPR on the man before the ambu­lance arrived. Does Kir­byville have a crew of trained and ade­quately equipped first respon­ders? I think I know the answer but I’m not sure. I think there are a cou­ple of  vol­un­teer fire depart­ments nearby but how many do first response on med­ical emer­gen­cies? If any do, where were they?

2. Jasper, a city of almost 7,500, is about 20 miles north of Kir­byville. They have at least one ambu­lance ser­vice, or at least they did. How many EMS vehi­cles are based in Jasper and were they all busy at the time? I don’t know. I wish some­one would find out.

3. Was the com­pany oper­at­ing the ambu­lance that picked up the vic­tim indeed not oper­at­ing in its reg­u­lar area? I’m not so sure about that since it report­edly was an Aca­dian EMS ambu­lance and this arti­cle says that Aca­dian was assum­ing oper­a­tion of Pri­or­ity One EMS in Sils­bee. The lat­ter com­pany had an air ambu­lance last time I drove by their head­quar­ters. The for­mer own­ers of Pri­or­ity One were recently con­victed in fed­eral court on charges of con­spir­acy to com­mit health care fraud and mail fraud, hav­ing bilked Medicare, Med­ic­aid, Blue Cross and Blue Shield out of  almost $1.75 mil­lion, by the way.

4. The heart attack report­edly hap­pened at that area’s men­tal health facil­ity. Does that facil­ity not have a defib­ri­la­tor? Are they sup­posed to have one? I don’t know. I’m just saying …

From what I can gather with these sketchy details of the story, the Kir­byville chief of police sounds as if he did quite a job to help that man and deserves praise for his efforts. Per­haps his city might reward him by buy­ing him a defib­ril­la­tor for his car, at the very least.

Yes, there are a lot of ques­tions remain­ing, even though tongues are, fig­u­ra­tively, wag­ging over the length of time it took for an ambu­lance to reach the vic­tim. But there are plenty of answers still wait­ing to be dis­cov­ered such as why weren’t first respon­ders there within a decent time inter­val with the equip­ment and drugs that might have kept the man alive and sta­ble? I will leave this up to the local media to answer these ques­tions since I don’t have time, nor do I fore­see any­one pay­ing me to solve these puzzles.

Like prob­a­bly mil­lions of other busy­bod­ies I am, at the moment, caught up in the whole David Let­ter­man scan­dal. My inter­est is that it is a com­pelling story involv­ing a high-dollar black­mail plot against a very unique enter­tainer whom I hap­pen to like.

Also grab­bing my atten­tion is the fact that the guy who allegedly tried to extort $2 mil­lion out of Let­ter­man over the star hav­ing sex with co-workers, Robert Halde­man, is him­self an Emmy-winning tele­vi­sion pro­ducer. Infor­ma­tion from an arrest war­rant for the man also says that the sus­pect lived at one time with one of the women with whom Let­ter­man was hav­ing an affair. That woman, Stephanie Birkitt, has been seen many times on “Late Night With David Let­ter­man.” Birkitt — who hosted Win­ter Olympic cov­er­age on the show in 2002 and 2006,  is not accused of any crimes. It appears just to be a pawn in the alleged blackmail.

I have no feel­ings one way or the other about any who are involved in this saga, at least from the stand­point of their involve­ment or non-involvement. I think Let­ter­man was smart to get out in front of this. I always thought Birkitt was cute and funny cast as a faux air­head. I actu­ally thought she would one day go some­where in show business.

The prob­lem with this type of story is we will get sick of it because it will be cussed and dis­cussed ad nau­seum as the media has a propen­sity for dead horse beat­ing. The rea­son is that the media, in most cases cor­rectly, assumes the pub­lic always wants more of a great story espe­cially one involv­ing celebri­ties. Another fac­tor is that the media is lazy. It is eas­ier to con­tinue milk­ing a story for every last drop than crawl­ing around out in the trenches look­ing for news.

So I guess I will enjoy the story until it starts get­ting on my nerves. When it comes to news, one must know when to say when.

Some­times I like to head for places I never been or never even heard of and see what’s mak­ing the news there. It’s not that I like to make fun of small-town news. As I have men­tioned here before I was a small-town news­man. Some peo­ple might call all the papers at which I once worked small-town news­pa­pers. Most were, although three were dailies and the last one I worked for on a full-time basis was a medium-sized news­pa­per. My first job, though was edi­tor of a daily that had a cir­cu­la­tion of about 1,200. I was chief cook and bot­tle­washer, as my Dad used to say.

Reporters and edi­tors, sales peo­ple, print­ers, cir­cu­la­tion man­agers, deliv­ery folks, all those good salt o’ the Earth peo­ple who ply their trade for news­pa­pers in small towns see news up close and per­sonal. The peo­ple who are vic­tims of car wrecks are their neigh­bors, peo­ple in their churches, the water rates raised by the town coun­cil affect the reporter and the edi­tor, and of course, foot­ball ties the town together until a los­ing coach tears the town apart. So off we go to the hin­ter­land and see what is hap­pen­ing among the salt o’ the Earth:

It’s prob­a­bly not a moun­tain lion in Nebraska. Chris Dunker, staff writer of the “Beat­rice Daily Sun” in Nebraska, gives a pretty exten­sive look at whether a big ani­mal peo­ple have seen around those parts is a moun­tain lion, coy­ote or just your run-of-the-mill uniden­ti­fied big-ass ani­mal. (UBAA, I guess.)

It ain’t heavy, it’s our neigh­bor­hood moose calf. Another ani­mal story. This you have to expect in Alaska, unless Sarah Palin is around. Then you have to expect a dead ani­mal story. Some neigh­bors in Mud Bay got together to res­cue a moose calf from a pond, accord­ing to the “Chilkat Val­ley News.” Their motto is: “Serv­ing Haines and Kluk­wan since 1966.” And now the can add the lower Sabine-Neches Val­ley of South­east Texas. Or not.

This might sound obscene but it’s not. You expect the quaint from Ver­mont. But some­how this head­line from an arti­cle writ­ten by Stephanie M. Peters in the “Rut­land Her­ald” (Oh stop it! We haven’t even made it to the head­line yet,) which is: “County phi­lat­e­lists pull out of state fair.” Rut­land was the only place I vis­ited in Ver­mont. Nice place, but I won­der if the stamp enthu­si­asts will go to a place more hos­pitable to their phi­lat­el­ing. Maybe Albany or Stockbridge.

Oh no! It’s a … it’s a … empty box. The Hoover (Alabama) police bomb squad was called to inves­ti­gate a sus­pi­cious con­tainer that two men in an SUV dropped off in a Food World gro­cery store park­ing lot in Pel­ham, Ala. Food World employ­ees thought the men’s activ­i­ties were sus­pi­cious, as did the Pel­ham police chief, thus the bomb experts from the nearby big­ger city (Hoover, about 70,000 peo­ple) were sum­moned. It turned out to be an empty stor­age box. There was no indi­ca­tion, accord­ing to the “Shelby County Reporter” in Columbiana, whether any lit­ter­ing charges are pending.

Finally, the police beat or blot­ter or what­ever has long been a high-interest sec­tion of many news­pa­pers. The lit­tle briefs vary from place-to-place. I wrote the briefs at sev­eral news­pa­pers and I can attest to the fact they are well read. Some places, where they are still able to pull it off, have a rather humor­ous take on the police beat or at least a funny head­line or two. Peo­ple seem to get ticked off about the least lit­tle thing and since humor seems lost among the right­eous bas­tards more and more funny will likely dis­ap­pear. But as long as we can still enjoy it, have fun with the Cops brief head­lines from one of my favorite news­pa­pers (or at least with a few of my favorite news­pa­per folks) “The Daily Sen­tinel” in Nacog­doches, Texas. I will let you read the briefs your ownself.

“How is this my fault? I didn’t put the road here?”

“How I am I going to get extra mints on my pil­low now?”

“Fine you can play through.”

Ah such fun. But I don’t miss count­ing head­lines, hot wax, car wrecks at 2 p.m.  on the road next to the big oak by the Johnson’s in Podunk, writ­ing 15 sto­ries a week, elec­tion night pizza, school board exec­u­tive ses­sions until 2 a.m., “Grip and Grin,” and finally, “Oh, I think I know a lit­tle about jour­nal­ism. I took a jour­nal­ism class in 1) high school 2) col­lege 3) high school and college.”

But I tell you young whip­pah snap­pahs out there who aspire to great­ness in jour­nal­ism, think big by think­ing lit­tle. If you want to learn about jour­nal­ism, learn about peo­ple. If you want to learn about peo­ple, go get your­self down to Podunk, get a job as a reporter or edi­tor of the weekly, and learn jour­nal­ism. And don’t worry, you won’t starve, the Lion’s Club always got good food as does most Rotary Clubs. Con­flict of Inter­est? Ethics vio­la­tions? If you can be bought off with a chicken-fried steak, you cer­tainly don’t need to be a journalist.